The Château de Gaillon is a French Renaissance castle located in Gaillon, Normandy region of France. History The somewhat battered and denuded Château de Gaillon, begun in 1502 on ancient foundations was the summer archiepiscopal residence of Georges d'Amboise, Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen; he made of the old château-fort a palatial Early Renaissance structure of unparalleled luxury and magnificence, the most ambitious and significant French building project of its time. Isabella d'Este Gonzaga was kept abreast of its development from the Mantuan ambassador in France. When in 1498 his patron, the duc d'Orléans, acceded to the throne as Louis XII, d'Amboise, who had spent much time in northern Italy on diplomatic missions and had been viceroy in Milan in 1500, where he had met Leonardo da Vinci and other artists and humanists, was suddenly raised to the high position of cardinal and prime minister. He had access to the architect-engineer Fra Giocondo, who had been invited to France by the king, and to the Italian garden designer Pacello da Mercogliano. By 1508 Gaillon's splendid new ranges and gardens, one of the first Renaissance structures in France, were fit to receive Louis XII and his queen, Anne de Bretagne. The Gothic range that formed an irregular outer court is entered through a massive gatehouse, remodeled in 1509, with octagonal corner towers and steep-pitched slate roofs. The decorative elements of its shallow-relief carvings in panels and pilasters are drawn from the Classical repertory. Behind the first, irregular court Cardinal d'Amboise constructed a range, the Galerie des Cerfs with the central triumphal gateway, the Porte de Genes (the "Genoa Gate"), which set apart a trapezoidal cour d'honneur surrounded by two-storey ranges, two facing one another with arcaded lower storeys. High pitched slate roofs were rhythmically pierced with dormers. A helical staircase tower stood in one corner. The north range was the new Grand'Maison, begun in 1502, which contained the suite of apartments of Cardinal d'Amboise. Between the chapel and the Tour de la Sirène at the northeast corner of the château, runs the vaulted gallery open to the view over the valley of the Seine. It is the first French loggia with an outward-looking aspect. At the center of the court once stood the finest fountain in France, which received its own plate in Jacques Androuet du Cerceau's Les Plus Excellents Bastiments de France. The fountain was commissioned on 14 September 1506 from